KEY POINTS:
Fuel cells are an alternative energy source that have been getting attention since petrol prices went through the roof." That's what I wrote in this column two years ago. What's happened since?
Petrol prices haven't come down, that's for sure - 91 octane was $1.70 a litre in
May 2006, compared with today's $1.90-plus. The world has also become much more conscious of the need to curb carbon emissions than even two years ago. But of fuel cells, very little news has been heard.
This month, however, the world leader in press releases about fuel cells, Toshiba, made another in a succession of predictions about when the technology would be commercially available. These proclamations go back several years.
In 2003, the company displayed a laptop computer powered by a Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) at the German consumer electronics trade show CeBIT. They would be on the market by the following year, Toshiba said. They weren't. In 2005, a Toshiba DMFC prototype featured on the BBC News website, which said the company expected to commercialise them the next year. That deadline was missed as well.
This month, Toshiba is reported by information technology news service IDG as saying DMFCs will be in mass production by next March. It's such a comfort to have something to look forward to.
Perhaps even more comforting is that Toshiba isn't the only game in town. In fact, a New Zealander is at the forefront of fuel cell development, as boss of 30-person Taiwanese company Antig Technology. Antig, headed by Nelson-born Brent McKendry, claims more than 200 fuel cell patents, with twice that number pending.
McKendry is a Kiwi who ended up in Taipei almost by accident in the early 1990s. He was heading for Britain on his OE when he dropped in on friends in Taiwan, meeting a girl whom he subsequently married.
He figured he needed to get a "real" job - by which he meant not teaching English. He had left New Zealand with a business administration degree from Victoria University and self-taught computer programming skills.
"Finding a job wasn't that easy as a foreigner - there weren't that many in Taiwan at the time - but I did score one with software start-up Ulead Systems."
Ulead made imaging software "for the ordinary bloke" that did much the same as Adobe's Photoshop but more cheaply. McKendry ended up going to the US with the company in 1998, establishing an office in Los Angeles as IT and the internet began to boom. It took his breath away.
After seven years at Ulead, McKendry left, going on to prosper at a string of US dot-com start-ups, before returning with his family to Taiwan and joining Antig.
"I've been fortunate, I must say, and that's given me the freedom and flexibility to pick and choose work that I find interesting."
The attraction of the fuel cell industry is that it represents a "generational play", McKendry says. "That's where I prefer to be now rather than chasing another dot-com [venture]."
McKendry has had to get to grips with chemistry as the head of a company that makes power supplies that rely on the reaction between hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity and water.
As do Toshiba's fuel cells, Antig's use methanol as the hydrogen source, with platinum as the catalyst that gets the reaction started.
The fundamental reaction was first observed in the 1800s. Development efforts these days focus on finding alternatives to platinum - hardly a cheap material at more than twice the price of gold - and miniaturisation.
Whereas Toshiba and other Japanese and Korean fuel cell makers are developing tiny units for consumer electronics devices, Antig has another market in mind - small electric vehicles (European postal services have tenders out for about 100,000 of them) and portable power packs for uses such as traffic signals.
That leads to a key design difference. Antig's are active cells, with a fan for sucking in the air necessary for the chemical reaction and a pump to remove waste water. Active DMFC's are bigger and heavier than the passive Toshiba type, weighing up to a couple of kilograms. But they also have greater capacity, providing up to 100W of power.
What advantage do fuel cells have over batteries? Much greater energy density, McKendry says. A DMFC cartridge of comparable size to an AA battery has 10 times the energy. But it will be years - if it happens at all - before fuel cells cost as little as batteries, he says.
"The whole idea is we don't replace the battery, we extend its life; we help you go longer between charges."
McKendry would have liked his venture to have greater Kiwi involvement than just his own, but found little interest when shopping the idea around in 2005.
"I'm a little disappointed because I believe New Zealand has huge cachet in regard to its clean, green image."
But with analysts AT Kearney, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and ABI forecasting a US$18.5 billion ($23.9 billion) fuel cell market by 2013, he's not losing any sleep over it. There may even be a share of the market left over for Toshiba.
Power source
* Fuel cells generate electricity through chemical reactions, typically between hydrogen and oxygen.
* The first fuel cells were built in the 1830s. More recently, they have been widely used to power spacecraft, in preference to batteries.
* In future, fuel cells could provide a power source for everything from computers to electric cars.
* Depending on the design, fuel cells can generate electricity directly from a variety of fuel sources, including hydrogen, methanol, natural gas, petrol and diesel.
Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland-based technology journalist
